Trustware Vs Socialware What Comes First?
🔥 Hot topic, should DAOs aim for trust first or social. Join the discussion
I recently learnt about the concepts of Trustware and Socialware and was curious to know more. I got to the root of it and found this original blog post on the concept of trustware versus socialware - Scaling Trust in DAOs: Trustware vs Socialware.
My notes are purely based on this blog post. Disclaimer, I haven’t seen a demo of this product. I’m always open to changing my views as more information comes to light.
Excerpts from the above mentioned blog post along with my thoughts in bold below each excerpt.
This is the great “promise” of DAOs - code at the center, humans at the periphery.
Code is at the center of everything DAO, it is what connects people together.
Trustware in DAOs means bringing rules on-chain. Using blockchain and smart contracts, rules defined at the social layer can be brought on-chain and enforced without reliance on human coordination.
The A in DAO stands for “Autonomous”, once the rules are set in the smart contracts they can execute without human intervention.
Trustware is a subset of digitization that focuses specifically on trust agreements that incur a social cost through coordination.
Is the goal to minimize social element from human run organizations?
we foster greater trust between parties by minimizing trust in people and maximizing trust in technology.
Maximizing trust in technology only works for simple things like payment transactions not for complex human coordination like a DAO requires. If this were possible then we all wouldn’t be moving JIRA tickets around all day.
Take, for example, the Governor contract. As mentioned above, many DAOs use a combination of Snapshot and multisig, including BanklessDAO and Yearn. In these cases, token holders vote on Snapshot, but rely on coordination between multisig signers to execute their decision - a form of socialware. The governor contract automates this step, automatically executing a transaction as soon as a vote reaches certain governance parameters, like quorum or submission thresholds.
This seems more like work-flow automation, trustware seems just a fancy name for it.
Trustware is not the end-all-be-all for DAOs. DAOs are inherently human organizations that will require systems that adapt to how humans relate and behave, not robots.
Finally Yes, This is what I believe in as well. DAOs are human first and robots later.
Conclusion
1. Trustware is another fancy word for work-flow automation
2. Relationships are undervalued - read PACT DAO article on the importance of relationships and how they are key to successful coordination. Quotes from the article below
He’s the writer of the book Mutual Aid that many people in the DAO space, even those who do not participate in mutual aid have read because these mutual aid groups run very similarly to how we want DAOs to run.
Dean Spade said that the primary “metric of success” in these groups is in relationships. Sometimes web3 tools allow us to bypass relationships because we could all purchase the same NFT and be authenticated into this group but do we have shared values?
Do we have a relationship with each other? Like how efficiently is a DAO going to operate if it’s full of people who just bought some high ticket NFT versus people who care about the same things?
In terms of our group, we've spent a lot of our season zero which has just been like this initial phase really building relationships.
3. Multisigs contracts are fascinating because they have enabled for the first time in human history random strangers to come together and manage funds over the internet.
4. I’m not convinced about the “Autonomous” part of DAOs unless Trustware is just another name for work flow automation.
5. In our Impact Media DAO of 100 members on Discord I’ve spoken to at-least 70 members and nothing can replace understanding your community, their motivations and interests so we can all leverage our excitement and passion to produce great things. This is not time wasted its time invested in the organization.
6. We need technologists that are humanists first designing DAO systems. A recommended book on this topic, Who Owns the Future, by Jaron Lanier. Who Owns the Future recommended (Notes on the book) by my newly made best friend on the internet Billy Bicket.
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